11. Brooke #2
I stand very still with my hands braced on the cold edge of the sink, and I make myself keep looking, because I have spent months not looking, and look where that got me.
Slowly, the way you approach a thing you already know and desperately don’t want to, I start to count backward.
I’m counting days. I’m counting the other thing, the last time, the last night anything happened between me and Adrian before the whole world came apart, before the promo swallowed him, back when he still read to me and I still fell asleep on his chest believing we were the version of us that lasts.
That night.
The good night. The last good night, the one I’ve replayed a hundred times since, where I let myself think we’d made it through the hard part.
It was a while ago. It was long enough.
It lands, standing there, that I’ve had all the pieces for a while and just refused to lay them next to each other, because I was too busy grieving, because a woman leaving her husband does not go looking for one more thing binding her to him.
I filed the sickness under heartbreak. I filed the exhaustion under insomnia.
I filed the dizziness under stress. I had a folder for every symptom and not one of them said the true thing, because the true thing was unthinkable, and I am very, very good at not thinking about unthinkable things until they force my hand.
My hands are shaking now. I watch them shake in the mirror, and I do the second calculation, the one about my own body and its reliable little rhythms, the ones I’ve been too wrecked and too distracted to notice have gone quiet.
Oh.
Oh no.
“No,” I say out loud, to the empty bathroom, to the woman in the mirror. “No, no, no, absolutely not, we are not doing this.”
But my body has already done it.
That’s the thing about bodies. They don’t wait for a good time.
They don’t check whether you’re in the middle of leaving your husband and rebuilding your whole life from a childhood bedroom.
They just go ahead and do the oldest thing they know how to do, quietly, in the dark, while you’re busy surviving.
Under the panic, in a place I am absolutely not ready to look at, there’s a feeling that isn’t panic at all.
A small, involuntary, terrible flicker of warmth, because it’s a baby, because some part of me wanted exactly this once, in the version of my marriage where I still believed we’d build the house with the tomatoes and fill the rooms with children and mean it.
I feel that flicker and I crush it, hard, because I cannot afford it, because wanting this would mean wanting it inside the wreckage of everything I’m trying to walk away from, and I do not know how to hold a good thing and a catastrophe in the same hand.
Not yet. Maybe not ever.
My palm has come to rest flat against my stomach without my permission. I take it away like the skin is hot.
I need to get out of this building before I do the thing I can feel coming, which is fall apart in the lobby of the firm that hired me two hours ago.
A smile I hope looks like a normal human smile gets me past the receptionist and out onto the sidewalk, where the arts district is loud and bright and full of people at lunch, and I dig my phone out with hands that won’t quite cooperate, because I need my mother, or Gemma, someone who loves me to tell me what to do with a fact this size.
Gemma’s name comes up under my hovering thumb.
It’s shaking too much to land clean, and I hit the wrong thing and it opens a photo instead of the call, and when I try again the screen swims, the little letters of her name sliding out of focus and back, and I can’t, my hands won’t, the phone feels suddenly enormous and far away.
My mother, then, thinking her name will be easier, thinking if I can just hear her voice she’ll know what to do the way she always knows. My thumb won’t find her either. The whole bright screen has gone slippery and unreal in my hand.
A shoulder catches mine from behind, a guy in a hurry.
“Watch it.”
“Sorry.” It comes out automatically, sorry, even though he’s the one who hit me, because apologizing is the last reflex I have left standing.
He’s already gone. A woman with shopping bags clips my elbow next and doesn’t slow down at all, doesn’t glance back, and the phone nearly goes out of my hand.
I clutch it to my chest.
The sweat comes up cold on the back of my neck, and there are too many people and too much sun and the edges of everything are starting to go soft and pale and wrong, and not one of these hundred people moving past me has any idea that the woman in the gray blazer is about to come apart, because why would they, I’m a stranger, I’m nobody, I’m just an obstacle in the lunchtime current.
Not here, I think. Please. Not here, on a sidewalk, in front of people who won’t even stop, on the best day I’ve had in two years.
Because that’s the cruelest part, the thing my swimming brain keeps snagging on as the street tilts.
I did it. I got out. I got the job and the future and the clean bright start that was only mine, I could feel the whole rest of my life opening up in front of me not four hours ago, wide and unwritten and my own for the first time since I was twenty-nine years old.
And now here I am.
Life was finally, finally getting better, the proof of it folded up in the offer they made me and the pencil over my heart, and my own body chose this exact afternoon, the single best one I’ve had since before the wedding, to reach up and pull the floor out from under all of it.
You don’t get to have the good thing clean.
That’s what I’m learning, apparently, on a sidewalk in the arts district, with strangers flowing past on both sides. Nothing comes clean anymore.
Every good thing arrives already tangled up with him.
The buildings lean as the sunlight goes white at the corners.
I put a hand out for a lamppost, a wall, anything, and there’s nothing there, just warm bright air and moving bodies that don’t stop, and my knees fold, and the last thing I feel before the pavement is how completely alone you can be in the middle of a crowd.
The last thing I think, with a strange floating clarity as my knees give and the pavement swings up to meet me, is that I never even got to tell my mother I got the job.
And then the ground rushes up, and the white swallows everything until there is nothing at all.